Guatemala Cautious on Young Migrants’ Deaths, Wary of Angering U.S.

MEXICO CITY — The deaths of two Guatemalan children in Border Patrol custody raised a furor in the United States, but drew a far more muted response in their own country, where a government focused on its survival is afraid that antagonizing the Trump administration could end American support.

The children, Felipe Gómez Alonso, 8, and Jakelin Caal Maquín, 7, fell ill and died this month after they crossed the southwestern border into the United States with their fathers, in separate events, and were detained by the Border Patrol.

Their deaths prompted outrage in the United States over the conditions that migrants, especially children, endure in Border Patrol custody, putting the Trump administration on the defensive as the president insists that Congress approve $5 billion toward building a wall he says will thwart illegal immigration.

But the Guatemalan government’s response has been cautious. Aside from sending diplomatic notes to the State Department requesting an investigation into each child’s death and offering to pay for the bodies’ return home, the government has sidestepped the issue. There has been no formal protest against the American crackdown on migrants or condemnation of the hardships that even children are facing in detention centers.

President Jimmy Morales of Guatemala has made no public statement, leaving it to Foreign Minister Sandra Jovel to issue updates on her ministry’s efforts to learn why the children died and bring their bodies home.

“The government of Guatemala regrets that a citizen has lost her life in this journey and points out that the places where migrants cross now are more dangerous and the distances they travel are longer,” the foreign ministry said in announcing Jakelin’s death.

The reason for the government’s reticence, analysts suggest, is a combination of Guatemala’s centuries-old discrimination against its indigenous Mayan communities, into which both children were born, and a careful political calculation ahead of next July’s presidential election.

Mr. Morales has cultivated relations with the Trump administration and its allies to assure their support in his fight against an international panel on corruption that has accused him of campaign finance violations and filed charges against a wide array of political and economic power brokers in Guatemala.

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Jakelin, who died in an El Paso hospital a few days after turning 7, was buried on Christmas Day in her village.CreditJohan Ordonez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

His efforts have been largely successful, and the United States has fallen silent as Mr. Morales has defied rulings from Guatemala’s highest court and barred members of the panel, including its head, from the country.

This is a marked break with precedent: For years, the United States unequivocally supported the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, the United Nations-backed panel known as Cicig, which has been working alongside Guatemalan prosecutors to bring corruption cases since 2007. Americans saw in its efforts a way to combat the corruption that has crippled Guatemala’s political and economic development — and, in part, fueled the migration of its citizens.

But the Trump administration has remained supportive of Mr. Morales even as his actions to shut down Cicig have taken Guatemala to the brink of a constitutional crisis. Now, with migration becoming a growing irritant in that relationship, Mr. Morales is anxious to smooth over the tensions.

When a caravan of thousands of mostly Honduran migrants crossed through Guatemala on its way to Mexico in October, the exodus angered President Trump, who fired off messages on Twitter blaming Guatemala and Honduras for allowing them to move north, said Fernando Carrera, a former foreign minister in Guatemala.

Despite the deaths of the two children, “the government of Guatemala doesn’t want to give more ammunition to that argument,” Mr. Carrera said. “They stay quiet and they don’t react.”

The Guatemalan government’s solicitous approach may not be enough to deter Mr. Trump’s anger, though, given his single-minded focus on migration. On Friday morning, Mr. Trump, citing reports of a new caravan, repeated a threat to cut off aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador for not blocking the flow.

Aid may be less of a worry for Mr. Morales, though, than continued United States support for his effort to oust the Cicig panel. For more than a year, Mr. Morales and his government have been carefully developing allies in Washington, nurturing ties with evangelical groups and conservative legislators and moving Guatemala’s embassy to Jerusalem, soon after the Trump administration did.

The Morales government is keen to protect its relationship with the Trump administration, said Quique Godoy, who resigned last year as a senior planning official in the Morales government in protest of the attacks on Cicig.

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The family of Felipe Gómez Alonso, 8, in their home in the village of Yalambojoch, Guatemala.CreditLuis Echeverria/Reuters

“They are more worried about Cicig than trying to denounce the United States government of mismanaging” its treatment of migrants, Mr. Godoy said.

Mr. Carrera, the former foreign minister, said the Guatemalan government and its allies saw Cicig — which has insisted on controls in campaign finance — as a threat before the election next summer.

The results of the July vote will determine what happens to the panel. It will also affect Mr. Morales’s future. He is not eligible to run for re-election and will lose his immunity from prosecution after stepping down, leaving him open to the Cicig-backed investigation into illicit campaign financing. The president’s son and brother have also been targeted by the panel.

What has guided the Guatemalan government’s response to the migrant children’s deaths is a consular protection program that the foreign ministry has had in place for many years to provide support for migrants, including legal help and, when deaths occur, the return of bodies, Mr. Carrera said.

Marta Larra, a spokeswoman for the foreign ministry, said that Ms. Jovel, the minister, had spoken frequently with the secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen M. Nielsen, in recent months to emphasize the importance of protecting migrant children.

The children’s deaths have also underscored the deep failures of successive Guatemalan governments to improve conditions for the country’s poorest people, particularly the indigenous Maya who make up at least 40 percent of the population.

Jakelin, who died in an El Paso hospital a few days past her seventh birthday, was buried on Christmas Day in her small village, a cluster of thatched-roof houses where Q’eqchi’-speaking families struggle to survive by growing corn and beans.

Felipe, who died on Christmas Eve in a New Mexico hospital, had left his isolated Chuj-speaking village with his father. The village is near the Mexican border in the province of Huehuetenango, which sends more migrants to the United States than any other in Guatemala. Four out of five people in his rural municipality live in poverty, official statistics show.

“We have a de facto apartheid society,” said Anita Isaacs, a Guatemala scholar at Haverford College. “This country continues to be almost as racist as it has been historically.”

The result is that the death of an indigenous child barely registers, she said: “These lives are worth less, and these people are fundamentally invisible.”

Alongside that indifference, Ms. Isaacs said, is an interest in developing the regions where indigenous people live. Palm oil plantations have begun to encroach on the Q’eqchi’ lands north of the village where Jakelin’s family lives.

Historically, these communities have been evicted to make way for cash crops like sugar or coffee, Ms. Isaacs said.

“What better form of eviction than them leaving the country completely?” she asked. “That’s a major reason why the Guatemalan government doesn’t care.”

The money that Guatemalan migrants send back, which helps support communities that are largely neglected by government services, is also an important resource. Remittances sent by Guatemalans working abroad accounted for 11 percent of Guatemala’s national income in 2017 and were the economy’s second most important source of foreign exchange, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The contribution is likely to rise as the number of Guatemalans seeking to reach the United States surges — the result, Ms. Isaacs said, of “a perfect storm” of poverty, violence and environmental crises.

In a region with little investment in infrastructure, education or health care, like the remote areas on the border of Guatemala and Mexico where these two children were from, a temporary hardship — like this year’s sharp drop in coffee and sugar prices — can provide the final push to people who are thinking of migrating, said Mr. Godoy, who is now the director of Propuesta Urbana, an organization that works on urban development and migration.

“The main reason why people keep migrating is because we are not generating the right conditions locally for people not to migrate,” Mr. Godoy said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Guatemala Is Cautious After Deaths of Children. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe